If you’re trying to make money online, sooner or later you have to face it. Conversion. That intimidating topic: how to get more buyers from the same amount of traffic.

The only reason conversion is intimidating is that there are a lot of places you can go astray. Most of them aren’t that hard to fix, but any one of a thousand little problems can keep you from getting the conversion you should have.

I don’t have a thousand tips for you today, but I do have 101 to get you started.

A part of me wanted nothing more than to go to bed and forget about blogging forever.

And yet, there I was, hunched over the computer, as I dug through my traffic stats for the millionth time. Somewhere inside was the answer to why I wasn’t getting more traffic, and I was going to find it.

This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work.

Daniel Heuman’s software helps writers, editors, translators, and proofreaders prepare error-free documents with greater ease and speed. He tried and abandoned PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, as he discovered the folks who clicked through weren’t his best prospects. (That’s a technique that almost certainly deserves some more thought and attention another time.)

Okay, maybe not everyone. Let’s just say everyone except that 10% of the human race who enjoy hating on awesome like I enjoy sipping coffee.

Fifteen years ago, Pixar smashed the creative and technical limits of the animated feature film.

It would be easy saying they came from nowhere, if it wasn’t for the decade they spent scraping by, sharpening their craft, rewriting broken rules while keeping what was best about the classics in their genre.

Did you ever wonder why some blogs attract tons of readers and others don’t?

Of course you’ve wondered. We all have. Because if you’re reading this blog, you almost certainly have a blog of your own. You think it’s great, and you want lots of other people to think it’s great too.

So what’s the answer? Why do some blogs become more popular than others?

There’s a scene in the animated series Futurama that cracks me up every time I think about it.

The show’s characters are at the horse track of the future, but there’s controversy when a race ends very, very closely — so closely that the race officials need a powerful electron microscope to judge the “photo finish.” The track loudspeaker eventually announces, “And the winner is … Number Three, in a quantum finish!”

And Professor Farnsworth, who had bet on the other horse, tears up his tickets in a rage and yells, “No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!”

With all the beads, prayers, affirmations, “laws of abundance,” and other woo-woo business accoutrements flying around these days, you’d think there’s some fire sale promotion going on spirituality.

Maybe it’s the rough economy, or the unsettling pace of change. Business seems to be getting more and more difficult, and support is hard to come by. When you’re struggling, the idea of having the unseen realms backing you is pretty appealing.